Law and regulation

In a presidential election year, banks tend to hedge their campaign donations. But in 2012, banks are betting heavily on Romney, in part because they don't think Obama can take a harsher view of their business.

Nobel prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman went head-to-head with Rep. Ron Paul, the libertarian Texas Congressman, last week and dived into some interesting areas.

The Federal Housing Administration is "by no means out of the woods," former commissioner and current Mortgage Bankers Association CEO David Stevens says.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau sees non-bank services as most in need of new regulation, Director Richard Cordray says. In a speech and subsequent interview, he discusses the progress of CFPB enforcement actions and the weakness of data on consumer finance practices.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is in talks with the Justice Department over how the agencies will divide and litigate fair lending cases, a CFPB official said Friday.

In 2004, I had the unique distinction of being perhaps the only person in history to have the U.S. Senate place a bounty on his head. I didn't rob a train. My crime was leading a federal investigation into misconduct at Fannie Mae.

Floyd Stoner, the former chief lobbyist for the American Bankers Association, has joined the board of $1.4 billion-asset Orrstown Financial Services in Penn.

The Treasury Department said Thursday it plans to auction off pools of the preferred stock it owns in small banks through the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

Coastal Banking Company in Beaufort, S.C., has become the latest community bank to take advantage of a new law that relieves small banks from the burden of filing financial reports with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

A day after top bankers met with Federal Reserve officials, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon blamed policymakers for stalling banking's recovery by "shooting ourselves in the foot."

Industry groups are calling on CFPB to lower the thresholds it will use to designate which firms will be included in its nonbank supervision program.

The Justice Department's antitrust division is probing Visa's new pricing system, signaling that regulators are still paying very close attention to how Visa and MasterCard set the fees for accepting and processing debit cards.

Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan will testify before Congress next Tuesday regarding efforts to allow more Americans to refinance their mortgages.

The central bank on Wednesday said it discussed the Volcker Rule and proposed counterparty limits at a private meeting with the leaders of several big banks, including Brian Moynihan of Bank of America Corp.

MasterCard's first-quarter profit rose 21% from a year earlier, as the payments network picked up debit card business in the wake of new regulations.

Marking its official exit from the Troubled Asset Relief Program, Regions Financial (RF) in Birmingham announced Wednesday that it has repurchased the warrant it sold to the Treasury Department as part of the program.

The gods of irony must be alive and well at American Banker. It's hard to think of a better explanation for the April 30 tirade against "deadbeats" from Andrew Kahr — whose approach to the credit business was described this way in a front-page San Francisco Chronicle news story in 2002:

A small sliver of the Fed's massive proposal to enhance supervision of the largest banks spells out exactly what enterprise-wide risk management should look like. It may be the single best shot at preventing another financial crisis.

In a letter to the FHFA, Republicans in Congress highlighted the potential downsides of allowing write-downs.

Recently, the issue of a lender's authority and right to pursue foreclosure on defaulted residential mortgage loans has become a subject of national interest. It is at the heart of the $25 billion settlement agreed to recently between the Federal government, 49 state attorneys general and the nation's five largest loan servicers.